Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle: Chromaticism

In Sections 1 - 4, I went into a great deal of detail about intervals, the construction of scales, major and minor thirds, and the construction of chords, but, lest we lose the forest in the trees, I marshaled all that detail in the service of one idea:

When the notes of the scale are played sequentially as melodies and/or played simultaneously as chords, their collective effect is to create a sense of being in a key. That is, they make the first pitch of scale scale feel like a stable resting point. The word for this effect is tonality.

So far, I've mostly limited myself to talking about melodies like the ones I listed near the beginning of Section 2, - "My Country 'Tis of Thee", Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", " Frère Jacques", "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", "Happy Birthday to You", "God Bless America" - tunes that use the tones of the major scale and no others. If you were playing these tunes on the piano in the key of C major, you would use the white keys exclusively.

C D E F G A B C(All this is covered in detail in Section 2.)

The time has come to begin expanding our idea of what tonality involves and to deal with the powers of those mysterious black keys. To do so, we need two new technical terms: diatonic and chromatic.

Music that uses the pitches of a particular scale - and those pitches only - is diatonic. Any music that introduces even a single note outside the scale is, by definition, chromatic. However, unlike pregnancy, the term is not absolute; you probably know many pieces that are just a little bit chromatic.

Consider the music of Irving Berlin. His tunes are predominantly diatonic; as mentioned above, "God Bless America" is entirely so. But the expressive power of many of his melodies typically depends on a few judiciously placed chromatic melody notes.

For example, the melodic line of the classic "White Christmas" depends for its emotional effect on just two such pitches, "I'm dreamingof a white Christmas".

Here's Berlin's version:

Example 1a:

and here's a purely diatonic version.

Example 2b:

Although it's not in Berlin's original, I very much want to hear a chromatic pitch between "To hear sleigh bells in the snow" and "I'm dreaming...", like so:

Example 1c:

and I've run across a few arrangements with that chromatic addition.

The chromaticism in Irving Berlin's songs seems so sweet and innocent, just a note or two now and then slipped in between steps of the scale. You'd never guess from his deceptively simple music how dangerous just one pitch from outside the scale can be. So let's consider a familiar tune that can teach us that lesson: "The Star Spangled Banner". Here is the beginning of the anthem with one incorrect note.

Example 2a:

And here is the same mistake later on in the tune.

Example 2b:

In Example 2a the mistake is on the second syllable of "early" in "dawn's early light"; in 2b, on "still" in "Our flag was still there". Here are the correct versions.

Example 2c:

The problem with Examples 2a and 2b is that they are purely diatonic; the correct version uses a note outside the major scale. To be precise, the Star-Spangled Banner uses a chromatic alteration of the 4th note of the major scale. The following example is designed to help you hear the altered 4th step.

Example 3:

To my ears, the diatonic versions of Examples 2a and 2b aren't obvious gear-grinding errors; they are merely less satisfactory versions of the actual tune. But in certain situations, the misuse of this same chromatic alteration amounts to musical malpractice, and I'm betting you'll have no trouble hearing what I mean. Here, starting from "And the rockets' red glare...", is the melody using only the chromatic alteration of the scale's 4th step.

Example 4:

Now that, I hope you'll agree, really does sound strange!

The Star-Spangled Banner isn't a complicated tune. Except for the alteration of the 4th degree of the scale in Example 2c, it is entirely diatonic. So how can it be that just one chromatic alteration sounds so good at one point in the tune and is so obviously wrong elsewhere in the same melody?

The answer to that question is not simple. In fact, having thought about it for a while, I'm not sure there is a satisfying explanation at all. Nevertheless, as we'll see in some future section, the alteration of the 4th note of the scale in particular has far-reaching consequences for tonality and for classical music especially.

But that is putting the cart so far ahead that the horse can't even see it. For now, I just want you to be be aware of the power of chromaticism, even in small doses.

In Section 4, Example 17, I talked about the tension inherent in the dominant chord: within the context of the major scale, the interval between the 7th and 4th steps of the scale makes most listeners want to hear the 7th step move up to the tonic and the 4th step move down to the third.

Example 5:

Here's a picture of those 4th and 7th steps on the piano keyboard in the key of C major.

C D E F G A B C 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Note that the keys that play the 4th and 7th steps of the C major scale are the only ones that are not separated from their neighbors on both sides by a black key.

To generalize for all major scales: the 4th and 7th steps are the only degrees of the scale which have a neighbor a half step away. And, when played together as a harmonic interval within the context of the major scale as in Example 5, each pitch wants very much to gravitate towards its half-step neighbor: 7 up to 1, and 4 down to 3. Within the diatonic scale, there is no other interval - no other pair of pitches - that creates this sort of tension, this pressure to move on to the next set of pitches.

It bears repeating: when I say that the 7th note of the scale "wants very much to gravitate" to the pitch above it, what I really mean is that I hear it that way. Classical music theory assumes that this is the way dominant chords behave, and there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, et. al. agreed. Nevertheless, it is a mysterious psychological phenomenon for which there is, as yet, no satisfactory explanation.

Chromatic pitches injected into diatonic melodies have to the power to introduce more of this sort of tension, more of this yearning for a pitch to reach another pitch a half-step away, the way the first syllable of "Christmas" melts into the second in "White Christmas".

There has never been a composer more in love with the sensual power of chromatic melodies than Mozart. This is the beginning of his String Quartet No. 16 in E-Flat Major, one of the six quartets from 1785 dedicated to Mozart's elder contemporary Joseph Haydn.

Example 6a:

Here is a diatonic version - that is, the same melody with all the chromatic pitches removed.

Example 6b:

And here is Mozart's version, with the chromatic additions emphasized. All the chromatic additions want to resolve to their diatonic upper neighbors.

Example 6c:

Example 6a is just a teaser for Mozart's harmonization of that little fragment a few measure later; the harmonization shows that Mozart could never resist the temptation to saturate his music with pitches outside the scale.Example 6d:

Whoa! We have not encountered harmonies like that before! (Neither had Mozart's contemporaries, not even Haydn.) But this passage is tame compared to the opening of the last quartet of the set, one of the most spectacular uses of chromaticism in the entire literature.

Example 7:

As these examples show, while we could go from example to beautiful example of chromatic melodies, the true power of chromaticism lies in its effects on harmony.

From Section 4, recall how chords are built by piling thirds on top of each other. Recall also that the pitches of the major scale can be distributed among the three cardinal key-defining chords, subdominant, dominant, and tonic, to define a key.

Example 8:

These chords are, by definition, purely diatonic. What happens if we try to harmonize pitches from the diatonic scale with chromatic chords, that is, with chords containing pitches from outside the scale?

Now here's a little melodic fragment, steps 1, 2, 3, and 7 of the scale from Example 8.

Example 9a:

I'll harmonize it with two basic chords, tonic and dominant.

Example 9b:

Because the last pitch of that fragment, the 7th step of the scale, is harmonized with a dominant chord, it wants to go back up to the tonic, like so:

Example 9c:

Now, let's change the harmonization of the last note of Example 9b.

Example 9d:

As I said near the beginning of Section 4, hearing the individual pitches within chords is far more difficult than hearing the pitches of a melody, even for trained musicians, so it is not reasonable to expect you to hear exactly why Example 9d sounds different from Example 9b.

As it turns out, the new chord contains only one pitch from outside the major scale. You may not be able to hear what that pitch is, but I do hope you can hear that the new harmonization, which contains only a single chromatic pitch, entirely changes the way that last note feels. It no longer feels like the 7th note of a major scale; instead it feels like ... well, for now at least, it doesn't really matter exactly what. Let's be content with saying that its musical meaning has changed.

(As I said, it really doesn't matter if your ear can isolate the one new chromatic pitch within the new chord, but here are the details anyway.)

Here's Example 9b stripped down to its bare essentials:

Example 10a:

The lower note is the 5th step of the scale.

If we just slide that 5th step up a half-step ...

Ex 10b:

Ta-Da! That's it! It's the chromatic step between the 5th and 6th step of the scale that makes so much difference. Now that you know it's there, try to hear that pitch embedded in Example 9d.

Now let's try little variation of our melodic fragment, the first three steps of the scale harmonized tonic-dominant-tonic.

Example 11a:

And now let's see what happens if we try use the same chromatic chord we used in Example 9d, with the pitches shuffled around a bit, this time to harmonize the 3rd step of the scale - that is, substituting the chromatic chord for the tonic instead of the dominant.

Example 11b:

That works even more powerfully! Now, instead of a stable tonic chord, we have a chord that, to my ears, very much wants to move on to another chromatic chord, like so:

Example 11c:

Wouldn't it be nice if we could find an actual piece of music that uses these chromatic chord substitutions to good effect? Not surprisingly, I have just such an example in mind.

Example 12:

That is, of course, the chorus of Tammy Wynette's big hit from 1968, "Stand By Your Man".

Several weeks ago, I finally got around to watching the 1970 movie "Five Easy Pieces". Early in the film, that chorus is heard in the background; hearing for the first time in many years reminded me of one of my perpetually unfulfilled resolutions in life - to become more familiar with country music. "Stand By Your Man" has all the virtues that I admire so much in the genre: a simple but powerful melody perfectly suited to its lyrics, delivered with impeccable musicianship. But what I love most about the tune is the way it uses the chromatic chord substitutions of Examples 9 and 11.

The melody of the chorus is completely diatonic. So is its harmonization, except for the strategic placement of our chromatic chords under "Stand by your man" and beneath "All the love you can."

Just as in Examples 9b and 9d, the first occurrence of the chord, harmonizing "man", substitutes for what, theoretically, could have been a simple dominant chord.

And, as in Examples 11a and 11b, the harmonization of "All the love you can" could have been a dominant-tonic,

Example 13a:

instead of this.

Example 13b:

(At the risk of getting overly digressive, I can't resist pointing to another country music masterpiece, Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again." Not only do I think it shares the same general musical virtues as "Stand By Your Man", but it also uses the same chromatic substitution for the tonic on the second occurrence of "Road".)

Example 14:

The real payoff of this chromatic chord occurs right after "All the love you can".

Although I hadn't yet introduced the terms diatonic and chromatic yet, my last example in Section 4, a YouTube of Lang Lang playing Chopin, involved, at the 5 minute mark, a big satisfying diatonic cadence emerging suddenly from the turmoil of chromaticism.

Even though "Stand By Your Man" will never be confused for Chopin, and even though it's on a much smaller scale, I find the final subdominant-dominant-tonic sequence under the song's title at the end of Example 12 to be as decisive and satisfying as anything in the classical repertory, and it is only so because of the chromatic chords preceding it.

To tell the truth, to somebody with formal training in harmony, the chord I've lavished so much attention on is not a particularly exotic chord; others like it glide by unobtrusively all the time in classical music. As usual, it's all a matter of context; the chord stands out in the highly diatonic world of country music and calls attention to itself by being placed so beautifully in its musical structure. The chord involves just one pitch from outside the major scale, but, for me, the way that chord is used gives the tune its expressive power; it's hard for me to imagine that "Stand By Your Man" would have ever become a hit without it.

All it takes is one chromatic pitch for the genie to get out of the bottle, ready to grant us not just three but literally an infinite number of wishes. Taken together, the examples we've listened to from Irving Berlin, Mozart, and Tammy Winette show how diatonic tonality can strengthen and enrich itself by recruiting pitches from outside the scale. But we've also seen, in Example 4, how just one misused chromatic pitch can ruin a simple melody. And, as we heard in Section 2, Example 12, uncontrolled chromaticism has the potential to destroy tonality completely.

In subsequent sections, I'll continue to explore the interactions between the stabilizing gravitational effect of the diatonic scale and the centrifugal forces of chromaticism.